hybrids

Feel free to argue otherwise, but I think GIMP's relevance has waned over the years, which is why I speak in that "past tense" you take issue with. For what it's worth I think Krita has worth in the domain of photo manipulation as well.

Krita also has automation utilities:

https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/main_menu/tools_m...

https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/python_scripting/intro...

I'm curious how you use GIMP and whether or not Krita would prove usable for you, i.e. if there's some critical specific functionality GIMP excels at where Krita falls behind.

GIMP (GLIMPSE?) had a number of interface and overall "jankiness" problems that, to my knowledge, it's core team never really sought to change. (I would probably have to install it again and play around with it again to have a more concrete idea of the osbtacles I remember). There was an old fork or plugin I think at one time that tried to make the interface more Photoshop-like, but I don't think it was very successful in the long run, not to say that painting apps should perfectly replicate Photoshop's interface - certainly there is room to explore potentially better alternatives. I just don't think GIMP is it.

That being said I think Krita has proven relatively successful in the domain of "open-source painting app". It has its own bits of jankiness here and there but it has grown to include a robust feature set (including some coloring tools which you won't find any analogue to in Photoshop) and has even acquired support for the G'MIC filter suite from GIMP.

As for names, sometimes people just don't know how to swallow their pride. I'm reminded of an incident with a certain Erlang package whose name had unintentionally coincided with a certain racist slur in America. When called out on this, it predictably bubbled into an argument; I think the author doubled-down on keeping the name but later just gave up and changed it to something less offensive. GIMP had the issue of people not wanting to use in the context of school computers and businesses solely because of that name, which I mean, if you refuse to do anything about that, you might have a problem.

I don't know if that's necessarily true. Look at Facebook - people say mean and vulgar things under their real name all the time, often complete with a picture of their own face. Anonymity can be a factor in the way we treat each other, but it doesn't tell us the whole story.

Handle and design loosely reminds me of the OLPC. It's cute (and aptly-named)

I just had a horrid flashback to ActiveX plugin installation wizards in Windows 98...

> Many CISC machines (eg Intel's) are CISC in name only. The instructions are translated to micro-ops in the hardware. The micro-ops and the hardware itself, is RISC.

This is a half-truth at best. Unless you work at Intel/AMD/etc. as a chip designer odds are you do not know what is "really happening" behind the scenes, so the underlying implementation is whatever they "want it" to be. The underlying implementations can even change from microarchitecture to microarchitecture.

So internally we might make a guess that microcode must look more "RISC-y" after transformation, given the fact that "some transformation" must be happening. The larger internal (renamed-to) register file was a common trait of RISC architectures, after all, and a lot of microcoded systems historically have been regarded as "RISC-y." But the existence of modern optimizations like macro-operation fusion suggest that the internals of CPUs today renders things much more ambiguous today with regards to "RISC-ness" vs. "CISC-ness."

Fun fact: the original ARM1 processor in 1985 was microcoded - https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/acorn/microarchitectures/arm1#D...

Seems to run contrary to the concept of human memory being supremely unreliable, and that our subconscious has a tendency - beyond the feeling everyone's familiar with of memories being "vague" and "difficult to remember" - to actually edit and reshape the concrete details from the way they actually happened. Obviously, given a certain context, this can result in terrible consequences. I remember this being discussed at length in the book "Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior"[1] w/r/t eyewitness testimony of criminal acts, but perhaps in some cases, our distorted perception of reality may be a important mechanism to our own self-esteem, provided that it doesn't go too far.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Subliminal-Your-Unconscious-Rules-Beh...

From what I recall, Malwarebytes (which is more or less the antivirus package to use if you're on Windows) is written in VB .NET. It using .NET in lieu of a native language gave it a leg up on certain other insecurely designed C++ based AV packages where it was possible for malware to exploit the AV scanning engine as a vector for arbitrary code execution.

I had just reread "State and Revolution" a few months ago and do not remember this quote. Do you mind linking to me where you found it?

"Marxist revolutions 'of the peasants' pioneered this mass delusion of flattening."

Ironically the Bolshevik revolution didn't really start out this way. The Bolsheviks advocated for a strict disciplined party model - if you've ever read what Lenin wrote of the Left-communists and Anarchists, it was clear that he was very much not mindlessly "against" structure. Of course, this would all eventually be liquidated by Stalin and Mao.

"Flat" organizations rarely seek to deliberately create cabals and power cliques - they do inevitably occur, sure, but the call for flatness usually comes as a result of you not getting what you really want out of the system. Ulterior motives are not really at play; rather it is just a case of organic collapse.

Democracy is a formal system of governance - this essay isn't "anti-democratic," it is just against the absence of formal governing structures in groups (nor is it necessarily against informal structures either, but just against the idea that larger organizations should be exclusively governed in an implicit manner, and is in favor of the idea of raw accountability)

The Jo Freeman article was written in retrospect to her own experiences with the feminist movement in the 1960s - she has another article - "Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood" - that I think illustrates very well that in spite of her belief of the movement, she had been hurt by its methodology (which was by no means exclusive to the feminist movement, as we see here) and not to mention was in no position to be able to "take power." She wrote these things in hope that the movement could course-correct, not out of some calculated Machiavellian strategy.

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm

Putting giant labels on top of everything and making grotesque caricatures of political figures is not what I would call subtle

This seems less like a case the "oh, the PC Police want to do away with political humor!" and more just shifting tides in media - i.e. that the conventional newspaper political cartoon is a form trending towards obsolescence. Political comedy is very much alive, at least in terms of its popularity and range across the political spectrum, attracting from the far left (e.g. Chapo Trap House) to liberals (e.g. most late night hosts) to all your various forms of conservatives (e.g. Crowder). To me the "political cartoon" as we once knew it seems like a dated formula, one that might be argued has already been replaced by the format of internet memes which can serve similar political function.

(Also personally I have never really cared for political cartoons, they've always seemed unfunny and too reductionist. Although I suppose the Stan Kelly Cartoons from The Onion might be an exception.)

Sounds similar to NVIDIA's GPU Direct RDMA in principle. https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect

I can't be the only one that really wants a monospace version of this. Although I suppose Inconsolata is good enough...

Both of these things were invented by Lisp. The reason C didn't include them was because C and its ancestors was designed to be easy to write a parser for (well, "relatively" anyway, it's not exactly as barebones as sexps) and to be usable with a preprocessor macro system, so you end up with a language designed with a lot of syntactic cruft (braces, semicolons, ternaries, etc.) meant as aids to compiler authors.